Symphony in AC

Stacks of loudspeakers framed the stage like the barricades of a medieval fortress. On the floor lay a magnificent tangle of wires and cables. On the stage apron, like Buddha contemplating his navel, sat a giant electronic console glorying in its own inputs, modules and mixers. Visitors to the 2,006-seat Zellerbach Auditorium at the Berkeley campus of the University of California last week could be forgiven for thinking that they were about to hear the rock concert to end all rock concerts.

Instead, the auditorium was the site of an experimental classical program that took a scary though not entirely unrealistic look at the future of symphonic concertgoing. The performers were 34 string, wind, brass and percussion players, banded--and wired--together as the Electric Symphony Orchestra. The conductor was Daniell Revenaugh, 38, who believes among other things that the way to reach today's young audience is to overpower them, rock style, with sound. Says Revenaugh: "A high school girl in her bedroom can create more sound than a symphony orchestra." Not any more. The Electric Symphony was loud enough to make Grand Funk Railroad sound like the Toonerville Trolley. When it played Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, the piece might better have been called Murals at a Cataclysm.

Attached to each instrument was a transducer, which converted the instrument's output into electronic signals. The signals were then mixed, balanced, amplified and blown out at the audience through loudspeakers. The effect was sometimes as intense and attention-riveting as listening to records through earphones; too often it was more a nightmarish stew of French horns sounding like tubas, trumpets like cornets, strings like wood saws. It did not help, of course, that Revenaugh had to surrender the conductor's usual command over tone and blending to the man at the sound console.

Still, someone was bound to try electrifying the orchestra, and though much work remains to be done, the implications are worth examining. Ordinary orchestras cost more and more to run, and funds are growing scarcer and scarcer. A small electrified orchestra might solve many a local impresario's money problems. If the engineering were expert enough, and enough loudspeakers placed in the right places, an electrified orchestra could solve any problem of hall acoustics.

Or eliminate the hall itself. Going to hear an orchestra in a concert hall is a tradition that stems largely from the 19th century. Revenaugh would like to see music lovers allowed to walk in and out of a concert, indoors or out, as though strolling through national parks, parking lots or shopping centers. In fact, those are three locales in which he would like to perform next with his Electronic Symphony Orchestra.

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